4 



The State aid forms but a part either of the invested funds 

 or of the expenditures incurred in behalf of the Museum. 

 During the first decade of its existence its resources were natu- 

 rally spent in forming the collections which in some fields of 

 study are to make it a great scientific centre. This result was 

 necessarily accomplished at a certain sacrifice of its educational 

 aims, and the number of trained students sent out from the 

 Museum as teachers during its earlier years, though undoubtedly 

 great, was perhaps not as large as might have been expected 

 from the pre-eminent qualifications of the founder himself as a 

 teacher. Fortunately, the period of great outlays for collections, 

 and for buildings and their equipment, is nearly past, and we 

 may hope in the future to see the means of the Museum ex- 

 pended rather on its laboratories, its investigations, and its pub- 

 lications, than on material objects. There are no doubt many 

 directions in which it would be advisable, for the sake of com- 

 pleteness, still further to increase our collections, but that may 

 be left for the future benefactors of the establishment. 



By a strange coincidence the foundation of the Museum dates 

 from the publication of the " Origin of Species." Of course so 

 powerful a movement in the scientific thought of the time could 

 not fail to modify the problems which the institution was intended 

 to illustrate and to solve. Yet the usefulness of the plans laid 

 down for the Museum remains unimpaired by the new methods 

 of treating questions of affinity, of origin, of geographical and 

 geological distribution. Should the synoptic, the systematic, 

 the faunal, and the palseontological collections cease to bear the 

 interpretation given to them by the founder, their interest and 

 importance, even for the advocates of the new biology, would 

 not be one whit lessened. If the anatomical, embryological, 

 synthetic, and other series presented by the pupil of Cuvier 

 from his point of view, are differently considered to-day by the 

 followers of Darwin, they may for this very reason have gained 

 a general interest they did not formerly possess. 



The plans of the founder have been realized, perhaps, far be- 

 yond his most sanguine expectations, and it has been reserved 

 for his immediate successor to see the establishment of a prosper- 

 ous school of Natural History, amply provided with laboratories, 

 connected with a University, and recognizing in the administra- 

 tion of its trusts the claims of the College and of the advanced 



